There is absolutely zero relationship between being able to play well and design well, both require a good knowledge of the mechanics and workings, that is where the similarities end.
This attitude that you are somehow a special little sausage and that you are owed something is frankly ridiculous.
Bit hyperbolic. Playing well implies understanding what you're doing, no? And in our case, your claim is outlandish, because you have a number of 15 year vets who have been through so many different patches that their perspectives ought to matter. Many of us have seen what works and what doesn't, first hand, and sometimes several times as idiocy has been repeated. One example would be us saying for over 8 years that mechanics should be clear, visible and readable, and Tempest in his infinite wisdom deciding to craft the most convoluted, contrived and unreadable ACM system ever.
As Mace has pointed out we need a dev team culture change as things have fallen away from how they used to work well in recent years into a kind of siloed attitude from some developers who think they can do it all just by listening to a few close people in game.
I'd love to know who Tempest consulted, because since 2017, he's held these mysterious private testing sessions and never once invited me or any other actually good duelist (at least from EU). He has only ever listened to feedback that he agrees with, and stonewalled gaslighted or misunderstood most negative feedback because he thought he knew better than 15 year veterans who have dueled at the top since before 2009.
Even when the vast majority of players told him for over 4 years that return on PB was needed, he did not listen. In fact, I think it's so bad that probably every single duelist worth a pot of piss would stand in opposition to his views, yet he went with his own flawed design decision. He's actually a good example to disprove your earlier hypothesis about there being zero relationship between playing well and designing well. The man could not play well, and obviously could not design well, and he made his flaws worse by arrogantly ignoring feedback from top duelists with very clear objections and good reasons behind their objections.
Its hard to blame them completly as the community constantly pat them on the back for listening, untill, as tempest found out he gets skewered for listening to the wrong people and all of a sudden he's gone from hero to someone who cant play the game, cant communicate and cant code, and frankly it is insulting to developers and majority of the community. Tempest is not the only one being drawn into that trap, and frankly he deserves better.
I think the attitudinal volte face can be attributed to his isolationism, as not many people were exposed prior to release. I don't think he deserves all the hate, of course, but neither does he deserve any accolades for serving up the steaming pile of shit that is R20.
It doesnt matter how good you think you are at playing the game, your opinion is no more valid than someone else who maybe isnt on the same level of execution as you as long as they understand the mechanics and the ethos behind the game as well as you then their opinion is exactly as good as anyone elses. Infact, to extend it, a player who shoots as well as your average storm trooper would have an opinion of more value to me if they understood how the game is supposed to work and had a good understanding of how we want the game to feel and play than someone who is good by accident - who doesnt understand the mechanics and doesnt view the game as a squad based objective game.
I'm a good guitar player. But i'm not a composer. There are many composers who cant play the instruments they compose for.
This neatly illustrates the lack of understanding that you guys have, if I may be so bold. Sure, you can play reasonably well without knowing everything, but you won't be anything but average, or slightly above average. Those who you claim to be accidentally good, are not actually very good compared to really good players and you not getting this very fact is part of the problem.
For many years now, I've divided duelists into four categories. Low-tier (new), mid-tier (knows what they're doing, average), high-tier (good at the mechanics and knows some stuff and finally, top-tier.
This top tier category is what we're concerned with. You cannot be a top-tier without intricately understanding the mechanics and the interplay of the game systems, because to push higher, you need to work on increasingly small things in your gameplay, to take small advantages that add up, rather than simply relying on being good at shooting, or PBing or whatever. Any top-tier will eat a high-tier mechanics god for breakfast, whether in open or duel mode, precisely because of their advanced understanding of the game and NOT because of better mechanics, because there's an upper limit to how far mechanical skill will carry you in a game like MBII.
I'm not sure I'm articulating it very well, but your above statement is a big issue and one of the traps that caused tempest to develop whatever the hell this current abomination is.
Feedback from people who are good, actually good, at the game,
should be prioritized over those who are not. It's not just about skill and execution of mechanics. Any MBII player should know that you can't just win by aiming well or PBing well, you need to have more substance than that, with a deeper and wider skill-set and an understanding of how rounds and fights play out. I mean, I've never had the best aim, or been the very best at PBing, but I absolutely slaughter people in open mode (rip) and duels despite someone else maybe being mechanically better than me at a certain skill, because the game is much more than just these obvious mechanics. There's a lot of game-sense and experience required too.
Your quote accurately describes where tempest went wrong: he ignored feedback from good duelists in favour of those who shared his vision (whoever these mysterious internal testers of his patch were). Valuing bad players with a yes man attitude over players with more than a decade of experience is precisely why R20 happened.
To end with, I'd like to say that I don't feel particularly entitled having my feedback ignored by tempest for 8 years.
May I be so bold as to turn it around and say that the claim of being arrogant and entitled, and 'knowing better', applies to the devs as well. They have enjoyed an incredibly loyal and obsessed playerbase for a very long time, willing to test, willing to write long feedback posts, but in the face of abject neglect, this is now crumbling.
I do not think it's productive to throw stones when living in such a glass house.